The health of Eagle Rock students and staff is a primary focus of ours. As we monitor the spread of COVID-19 (Coronavirus Disease-2019), we are writing to keep you apprised of the actions and policies we are enacting to keep students and our staff protected.

In response to the rapidly changing COVID-19 circumstances — and in consultation with state and national agencies — we have placed restrictions on student and staff travel, as well as on visitors to our campus in Estes Park. We’ve also increased our diligence around campus in the areas of cleaning and sanitizing, and we’ve mounted a campaign to encourage hand washing and even healthier habits.

With all of this in mind, students returned home on Wednesday, March 11, 2020 with a plan for supporting remote learning so they can stay on track with their academic progress while at home as we wrap up our winter trimester.  

At this time, we anticipate starting the summer trimester as previously planned — on May 11. We expect before that time, that a lot more will be known about COVID-19, including whether our summer trimester start date will hold.

We are very grateful for the strength and togetherness of the Eagle Rock community. These are difficult times and we appreciate our community’s understanding and flexibility as we sort through this uncharted territory. We’ve been through tough times before, and without fail, they teach us important lessons and strengthen our resolve. The health and wellbeing of students and staff is one of our highest priorities and we’re holding that at the center of our decision-making.  

Something wasn’t working about high school. Either they were brilliant and bored or addicted and homeless. Eagle Rock School is a residential high school for young people not well-matched with their prior school.

Located on a square mile of mountain wilderness in Estes Park Colorado, Eagle Rock is a project of American Honda.

Students apply to the tuition-free school with the support of an adult sponsor. Students enter before the age of 18 and spend at least two years on campus.

Eagle Rock learners start with a three-week wilderness experience (watch the trailer of a documentary). For most students, the interpersonal dynamics are even more challenging than the outdoor experiences.

There are eight themes that serve as guideposts for the overall school design. Four related to individual integrity: intellectual discipline, physical fitness, spiritual development, and aesthetic expressions. Four relate to citizenship: service to others, cross-cultural understanding, democratic governance, and environmental stewardship.

There is no scope or sequence but there are five expectations that guide course and project design: developing an expanding knowledge base, communicating effectively, creating and making healthy life choices, participating as an engaged global citizen, and providing leadership for justice.

A series of interdisciplinary projects are organized into trimesters. All students engage in maker and art experiences. Students track their progress as an individual learning plan. They petition to graduate when they’re ready to demonstrate proficiency in each of the five expectations.

Eagle Rock students live in six student houses. They meet weekly with their advisor to discuss a mix of personal and academic topics. In a residential facility, there is a lot of shoulder-to-shoulder advising.

Students have a voice at Eagle Rock–both in their course of study and in how the place is run. They sit in on staff meetings and disciplinary actions, they help to hire staff and teach classes.

Dan Condon came to Eagle Rock as an intern in 1995. He returned in 2002 leading a fellowship program. Today, Condon leads the professional development center which provides pro bono experiences based on the Eagle Rock model. They serve as school change consultants to clients coast to coast using a mixture of improvement science and design thinking.

Key Takeaways:
[:56] How did a kid from Wisconsin arrive in Estes Park, Colorado?
[2:07] Dan speaks about his career journey after he first arrived at Eagle Rock School.
[3:03] Dan speaks about what the learner experience is like at Eagle Rock.
[6:02] Dan describes the academic program at Eagle Rock.
[6:36] Dan talks about the advisory program at Eagle Rock.
[7:33] Dan speaks about the unique experience new students do in the first trimester once they arrive at Eagle Rock.
[8:27] Dan’s experience working with kids who are not experienced campers and what he thinks they gain from such an experience.
[8:52] About the opportunities for expression in the arts at Eagle Rock and why it is so important.
[9:27] How and when do students graduate from Eagle Rock?
[10:15] How is the school program is organized? And how long do the students attend?
[10:21] Dan speaks about the various courses that are offered at the school and how the curriculum is organized.
[11:06] How much voice and choice do students get at Eagle Rock in terms of what they can study?
[12:11] Dan speaks about the professional learning practice that he runs.
[13:45] Do they work with any big, traditional public schools that are trying to embrace some of their practices?
[14:36] Is Dan encouraged by what he sees happening with American education? And is he seeing more educators and schools adopting some of the practices that they’ve honed here at Eagle Rock?
[16:01] How is Eagle Rock paving the way for learner-centered environments… and why you should come down to visit the school for yourself!
[17:47] Tom and Jessica wrap up this week’s episode!

Mentioned in This Episode:
Eagle Rock School
Dan Condon
Public Allies
All Who Dare (Documentary, 2018)
Big Picture Learning

Before joining Eagle Rock School (CO), students are tested. Though probably not in the way you think. 

As the recent documentary All Who Dare showcases, each cohort of new students leaves behind their families, friends, and familiar environments for a 24-day orientation program in the remote wilderness. 

Eagle Rock, a tuition-free, residential high school, is committed to helping the most disengaged students find their way back to an appreciation of education. For many students, it’s a last chance to find educational success. The school is an initiative of the American Honda Education Corporation, a nonprofit subsidiary of the American Honda Motor Co., Inc. 

Honda and Eagle Rock were looking for unique opportunities to showcase the school’s 24-day wilderness experience and landed on the idea of a documentary film. All Who Dare—also the school’s motto—follows nine incoming Eagle Rock students who embarked on the orientation trip in Colorado’s Lost Creek Wilderness in May 2016. Guided by experienced wilderness educators, the students are challenged physically, emotionally, spiritually, and socially. They quickly learn that completing the trip is only the first step in taking responsibility for their lives.

Pictured: The documentary debuted in September 2017 at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park. It continues to be shown across the country. Courtesy of Eagle Rock School (CO)

BEYOND THE CAMPS

“Profile on” Japanese Americans in the Performing Arts

Meghan Tokunaga-Scanlon, Part 2
by Margaret Ozaki Graves

Recently, I was lucky enough to travel to Estes Park to visit the beautiful mountain campus of Eagle Rock School and meet with Meghan Tokunaga-Scanlon, a Colorado native performer and educator in the performing arts. As mentioned last month, Meg leads performing arts programming at Eagle Rock School and Professional Development Center, a small, private boarding school that focuses upon serving adolescents with “engaging, progressive education practices.” The students had just returned from a school break when I arrived and the campus was laid back, yet buzzing with youthful energy. Meg and I gathered on rustic, oversized leather couches in the lodge to continue our interview.

MOG: You are a Colorado native and Japanese American. What is your connection to the Front Range JA community?
MTS: My grandparents used to be farmers. They lived in Alton and they moved to Greeley—I think my mom was in elementary school. And so they knew a lot of people through that and they had a huge connection to people through bowling as well. My grandpa used to be a part of JAMBA, the Japanese bowling league….I would honestly say the connection began again when I picked up this musical and started reaching out to different organizations.

MOG: How did you find connections to the Internment Camp experience?
MTS: I googled JARCC, got in touch with them and I went to one of the All Things Japanese Sale. And I got to go to Pacific [Mercantile], so I happened to meet Marge Taniwaki. We met there, and then, every connection after that—I felt like I saw her everywhere and that was great….Hearing Marge’s story specifically—she came, she actually drove up to talk to our students and gave her depiction and her experience of what happened.

MOG: What drew you to Allegiance and why did you choose to perform it at Eagle Rock?
MTS: My mom and I had seen it [Allegiance] advertised when it was in New York and I was like, “Oh man, I wish I could go see it, but it’s so far away.” And then it came to the [movie] theatres….so my mom and I went to see it and we ended up seeing a bunch of our family there. I was just a really meaningful experience, I think, for the community… one—the show was written; and then—it got broadcast in a much more equitable way. I just remember sitting in the theatre being like, “Wow, I feel like these themes are coming up again in our world and it would be so cool if we could do this show [at Eagle Rock].”
And so then, I just happened to write to the company and was like, “Hey, I don’t know if it is up for licensing and I’m just curious” and I figured they were going to say, “No, it’s not up for licensing” and then they just shot back with “Yeah, are you interested? I could send you something to look at,” and I was like, “Oh!? Okay!” Yeah, it just kind of happened by chance and it [Allegiance] ended up fitting really well with what was going on at the time…. It feels really important to do this right now.
Part of the bigger picture is I feel like Eagle Rock intentionally picks shows that have more depth to them. Often times the topics are a little more controversial, but I find that ours students relate to that a little more.

MOG: Talk about the student and audience response to the production?
MTS: I think talking to Marge made it real for them. We don’t have a huge Asian or Pacific Island population here in Eagle Rock and so, even from the beginning, we were talking about the importance of even if you don’t look like the people in the story, the story is still universal, so how you communicate that story is important even if you don’t look Japanese.
I think the relationship they [the students] built with Marge and the more exposure they got to the [Japanese American] community, they just connected. The last few weeks when we were putting everything together, I could just feel the weight on [the students] and every time that they talked about it [the show] or talked about it in public with people they were like, “This is a really important story and we have to make sure that people understand and that they know.”
Because we’re up in the mountains and really far away from a lot of other places, so I feel like its really hard to get an audience…. [The audience] wasn’t hundreds of thousands of people, but it felt like everyone who came was really positive and really enjoyed it. And I think, really, the whole point was to start dialogue. During intermission, we had snacks and I heard people talking and talking about different ideas and looking at students’ projects. That was really awesome to see.
MOG: Tell me more about the students’ projects.
MTS: We had two students research Japanese Internment Camps in general….and then other [students] zeroed in on topics like No-No Boys. We talked about Sympathizers, people outside of the community who sympathized and were doing covert operations to try to help and support people.

MOG: What is your approach to developing choreography?
MTS: Choreography feels super important to me—in the sense that it should communicate the story. It shouldn’t be dancing for the sake of dancing. Why is the movement happening? How intentional can it be? So a lot of it [choreographing] is just listening to the music over and over again and thinking about “What is the message that needs to be communicated in this song and how can the movement add to that or enhance it?”

MOG: You mentioned helping your students to connect to Japanese American Internment experience presented in Allegiance by identifying universality in the story and characters. Can you speak a bit more about your perspective on issues of casting and diversity in the current performing arts?
MTS: It’s interesting. We taught a class a couple of years ago where we had this conversation of casting and color-blind casting versus intentional casting and when we were picking this show, we were talking about the difference between educational and professional [performance]. Very often with educational [productions], I think it should be as diverse as possible….I think there is a fine line between appreciation and appropriation and that’s all dependent upon the instructors—what research are they willing to do? What conversations are they willing to have? What experts are they willing to bring into the conversation to enhance the production so that it’s really a community effort and based people’s actual lives instead of just, “Oh, I watched this video and I interpreted it. I think that’s what it means, so we’re going to do it here.” So I think, often in educational settings—like middle school and high school—casts should be as diverse as possible. So, whatever your community, if you have students of mixed race and ethnicity, but the part says it’s white, that shouldn’t matter. The person who is best to play the part should play the part. I think that’s important for students to learn empathy and understanding and respect of other cultures; we can’t understand something that we don’t know. So I think in education, we have a little bit more room to play with it and that’s the best time for them [students] to learn, ask questions and make mistakes, and try things and really try to understand what that means.

And then, professional [performances], I think that’s where we need to do a better job. We do have the people who can perform in a show like In The Heights and be Hispanic and Latino and Latino. We DO have the Asian and Pacific Island actors to be in Allegiance and we don’t often see that. I think representation is important and, honestly, going to see Allegiance [Broadway production cinecast] at the theatre was a defining moment for me as a Japanese woman. I never see that. Even my mom was mentioning “I’ve never seen that many people that look like us in a movie.” I know that there’s a recent [revival of] West Side Story that was in Spanish and English and I was like, “Yes! That’s exactly what we should be doing.” Because for so long, in an attempt to pretend that we were “color-blind” casting, we just used a lot of yellow face and black face. Even though stereotypes are based on a truth, they’re not the only truth. So, I think in the professional setting, we need to do a better job and write shows that are representative of communities that are living here in the states.

By: Tom Liszka

As part of its NextUp initiative to interest teens in tech careers, in 2017, CompTIA partnered with the FUSE program at Northwestern University to expand and enrich STEAM learning for middle and high school students around the country.

Sara Benge

With support from NextUp, Eagle Rock School and Professional Development Center in Estes Park, CO, received a new FUSE Studio with CompTIA-funded tech activity. Eagle Rock is a full-service, not-for-profit educational reform organization that operates a year-round residential high school, serving adolescents who are not thriving in their current situations, for whom few positive options exist, and who are interested in taking control of their lives and learning.

“FUSE is lending opportunities to students to engage in STEAM learning outside of the classroom, outside of their traditional daily classes where they can pursue things purely based on their own interest and curiosity,” said Sara Benge, science instructional specialist at Eagle Rock. “They’re excited to learn the skills, so I think it has offered new insight into the world of STEAM learning that they didn’t have access to as much before.”

FUSE is a STEAM (STEM plus Arts) education program that facilitates student exploration and learning through hands-on, interest-driven challenges inspired by real-world STEM and design practices. In FUSE, students work in a studio-like environment, learn through making, and develop 21^st century skills such as problem solving, persistence and communication.

“I knew I loved FUSE from the first time I saw it,” said one student. “As soon as I heard that we got a 3D printer, I didn’t even know what I could do with it, but I knew I wanted to do something with it. The idea of creating something is so appealing to me.”

In the free-choice environment of FUSE, every activity has to be engaging at every step of the way to maintain student interest.

Becky Poore

“What FUSE gives is that infinite set of resources that you get with the internet or a whole bunch of math problems, but it gives it to us in a physical form,” said Becky Poore, math instructional specialist at Eagle Rock. “We have this wealth of physical resources that students get to pick and choose from, and this wealth of software that students can play around with and feel like they have that independence and choice.”

In FUSE, teachers like Benge and Poore act as facilitators, helping to guide the process of exploration and discovery by encouraging students to problem solve, take risks, try and try again, be creative and learn with and from their peers. Because students work on challenges in a different order and at different paces, they develop unique expertise that they share with their peers. Students become leaders, peer mentors and experts in various STEAM-related tools and practices.

“That’s the dream for me, is to not even have to intervene or come over and say, ‘I know how to do it, let me show you how to do it,’” said Benge. “I don’t need to be the keeper of the knowledge. The students have all of the tools.”

The biggest difference is that the students are the ones driving their learning, says Benge, and that they do not need to wait for the teacher to tell them what they’re doing that day, and they don’t need to wait for an instructor to lead them through a certain activity.

“They can come in and know what to do to get started, and all of the tools are at their disposal without needing to wait for an instructor or teacher to come around.”

Students in FUSE have access to a diverse suite of challenges. They choose who to work with and whether they work alone or collaboratively. This choice and interest-centered environment helps all students find challenges which inspire learning and engagement.

“I really like the fact that we can have our work be completely unique,” said the student. “The whole creation process, you can follow the guidelines and do what the tutorials ask you to do, but once you have the tools from that, you have the ability to really expand and make whatever it is you want to make.”

FUSE Studio at Eagle Rock School and Professional Development Center

Each challenge is a carefully designed educational activity composed of levels in increasing difficulty. Each challenge is based in a STEAM topic and designed to appeal to students’ personal, non-STEAM interests. The leveled structure of FUSE challenges allows for personalized learning. The early levels hook students and provide early success, while more advanced tasks in later levels build confidence and ability.

“Level one is a whet the appetite kind of level, which gets students started with something easier, so they can see where they might go with the later levels, but it’s getting them to have that first success,” said Poore. “The next levels get more and more complicated, and they get to see newer and different successes and feel themselves moving toward that goal while also building the skills that they’re going to need to get there.”

The increase in difficulty sometimes leads students to not complete all the steps within a challenge. Many people may deem this a ‘F’ if they were grading a paper or filling out a report card, but the “F word” in question here – failure – is very rarely used, if ever, in a FUSE studio.  That’s because in FUSE, failure is just another try.

According to Benge, it’s important for the student to determine what ‘done’ is for them on a certain challenge. She offered her personal philosophy, saying, “I don’t think a done point requires them to have accomplished a set amount of challenges or a set amount of levels. It is up to them, and they have that challenge by choice and freedom to move through the levels at their own pace. We work with them on setting goals, but goals aren’t often centered around achievement of levels. It’s achievement of problem solving, or asking for support, so I think those are more of the things we work with them on in FUSE.”

“My favorite thing about FUSE is watching students find the challenge that sparks their excitement and curiously. Sometimes that takes a bit, but it’s cool to see them work through challenges and really stay focused on something that maybe they haven’t done in the past. I do think that students surprise themselves, but I think that it’s not necessarily exclusive to the FUSE labs. I think that students do that in their lives everywhere all the time.”